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Cliff Stearns aims to head Energy panel

Stearns's fundraising efforts reflect a keen interest in the top Energy and Commerce spot. |
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Two tech industry sources tell POLITICO that Stearns could remain at the subcommittee level, rather than lead the full committee, or may head elsewhere – particularly to the Veterans Affairs Committee.

Veterans Affairs may appeal to the congressman, in particular, given his constituency and previous work in the Air Force. Stearns is currently the vice ranking member on that panel, and the top Republican, Rep. Steve Buyer, is retiring.

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But GOP rules prevent lawmakers from running both a full committee as well as a subcommittee, meaning Stearns would have to give up his current leadership role for a more plum assignment. It is not immediately clear whether Stearns is weighing such a move.

But if Stearns did stay and take over Energy and Commerce, health care repeal would be a top priority, he said.

Stearns promised a series of hearings and a new bill that would keep some elements of Democrats’ health care package while adding in many of the ideas GOP leaders supported earlier this year.

That new effort would retain rules that would allow young adults to stay on their parents’ plans until age 26, while stipulating “some understanding that people with preexisting conditions should be taken care of,” he said. It would also substitute in more robust provisions on preventative care and medical liability reform, as well as some of the other healthcare items that Stearns and others first pitched as part of a 1994 health care bill.

A full committee under Stearns’s stewardship could also play aggressively with the Environmental Protection Agency, which the congressman lambasted for new regulations that amounted to a de facto “energy tax” on businesses. “For the most part, they have not come up here, so we need vigorous oversight of the EPA,” he said.

But it isn’t clear the kind of relationship Stearns might have with congressional Democrats and the White House on energy; he declined to note any energy proposals over which the two sides might find common ground.

“I don’t see anything in the Senate, and I don’t think anything in the administration,” he said of possible areas of compromise, while hammering House Democrats for passing their cap-and-trade bill in 2009.

Stearns has already etched out his positions on top tech and telecom issues as ranking member on the Communications, Technology and the Internet subcommittee.

Unlike Upton, Stearns has not already commit to voting against a compromise bill on net neutrality – or, rules that would ensure Internet providers treat all Web traffic equally. Instead, Stearns repeated his call from September: that the compromise, drafted by Democrats with even some support by top telecom companies, needed more time and a few hearings before he could make a decision.

Stearns did, however, stress that he would use the full committee to prevent the FCC from reclassifying broadband in the interim, blocking the agency from using its own rule-making powers to begin regulating net neutrality.

Stearns promised to sanction the FCC and stop it in its tracks if it reclassified under his watch. “The FCC does not have the jurisdiction to do it,” he said.